


Trying to Find the Ground

by DetectiveJoan



Series: Asexual Atypicals [4]
Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Asexuality, Coming of Age, F/M, Pre-Canon, queerness circa 2002
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 17:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12085656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: Scott Nakamura asks Joan to Homecoming their senior year of high school. She says yes mostly because she really doesn’t want to be the only girl in her social circle who has to go to the dance without a date.





	Trying to Find the Ground

**Author's Note:**

> You can pry the headcanon of Joan and Mark being Japanese-American from my cold, dead hands.
> 
> I am >slightly< less attached to the headcanon that they grew up in Nowheresville, Idaho, but this might read better if you keep that idea in mind, idk.  
> Title from "Butter Teeth" by The Mountain Goats:  
>  _Who's here? Just us_  
>  _Nobody else around_  
>  _Stray electrical currents_  
>  _Trying to find the ground_

Scott Nakamura asks Joan to Homecoming their senior year of high school. She says yes because Scott seems like a nice enough guy with whom she has a number of mutual friends, but mostly because she really doesn’t want to be the only girl in her social circle who has to go to the dance without a date.

They all go as a group, first to dinner at some semi-fancy restaurant her parents never would have sprung for. She makes small talk with Scott over breadsticks, and tries not to drag her corsage through her salad dressing.

The dance itself is fine, even if she spends most of the evening regretting her choice of shoes. She’s never slow danced before, but it turns out it mostly consists of resting her hands on Scott’s shoulders and swaying to the music. Not that complicated.

When he takes her home, she lets him kiss her on the front porch. She’s distracted the whole time with praying that Mark isn’t spying on them through the front room curtains.

///

She and Scott spend a lot of time together over the next few weeks, mostly (complaining about) doing homework and comparing college applications.

“Are we dating?” Joan asks one day in October, when Scott takes her hand as they exit a particularly grueling study session where she hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything other than the kitschy heart sketches all over Megan Fields’ notebook.

“Sure,” he says, like a shrug.

///

Her parents love him.

“It’s like, just because he speaks Japanese better than I do, he’s suddenly the son they wish they had,” Mark huffs, shoving her psych textbook onto the floor so he can flop dramatically across her bed.

“Don’t forget that he wants to be a  _real_ doctor,” Joan replies, laying the same emphasis on the word that her father had. She’d already shared these complaints with Scott a half dozen times, but he hadn’t been able to mollify her.

“If you’re not gonna marry him, you should let Mom and Dad know so they can just adopt him.”

She’s not going to marry him.

///

They fuck a few times, on Thursday afternoons when her parents are still at work and Mark stays late at school for some art club. Her bed wasn’t built for very vigorous activity, but they make it work.

The sex is okay -- not earth-shattering, but at least it doesn’t hurt like she’s heard some girls say it does.

She and Scott don’t talk about it much.

///

They breakup very mutually and very amicably shortly after graduation. They’ve accepted admissions offers to colleges in different states -- Scott to some school with a prestigious pre-med program, and Joan to the university where she hopes to get her doctorate eventually.

All things considered, their relationship was good, but not good enough to try and keep it up long-distance.

///

A week after she moves into her dorm room, a letter shows up in her P.O. box with his name scrawled in the top corner. A weird wave of homesickness washes over her, and she rips the envelope open right there in the post office.

He’s sent her a two-page update on his new school and classes, sprinkled with fun gossip about his professors and complaints about the cafeteria food.

“Missing you,” is scribbled at the end, right above his signature.

 _Missing you, missing you, missing you_. It echoes in her head as she stands in line to buy stamps.

She writes back to him that night. She tries to keep her letter as light as his had been, but she finds herself detailing all of the anxieties she’s been too nervous to share with her parents or roommates. If Scott thinks her fears are childish, he’ll probably be kind enough not to tell her so.

She gets his response to her letter a week later. The simple fact that he replied is more reassuring than she expected.

///

It’s easy to keep in touch with him for the rest of the year. Something about the distance between them, or about being _just friends_  now makes their relationship feel so much safer than it had in high school.

Maybe it’s weird, because maybe she should be paying more attention to the boys on her own campus and not this guy who moved a few hundred miles away from her, but Scott somehow becomes her best friend.

///

There aren’t any boys around who catch her attention -- and she’s fully aware that she doesn’t notice potential romantic partners the same way most of her peers seem to. On bad days, she supposes it’s a rare pathological problem, some wire in her brain that got connected incorrectly or short-circuited when she was too young to notice. Nothing like that comes up in her psych courses, though, so she does her best to brush it off.

If someone asked why she doesn’t date, she’d tell them that she’s really focused on her studies; she’d rather have a 4.0 than a boyfriend.

But no one actually asks, so she just tells herself that on nights when she misses the warmth of curling up with someone else in a too-small bed.

///

The new ease of her friendship with Scott holds up when they both crash back home the next summer, thank God.

///

Scott comes out to her one night when she’s crashing at his house and they’ve stayed up way too late chatting about absolutely nothing.

For some reason, she isn’t really surprised by the admission. What she does feel is sheer, screaming panic deep in her chest -- which she shoves down as firmly as she can. It’s the twenty-first century, for God’s sake; being gay doesn’t have to be a tragedy, even if his parents won’t be happy about it.  

 _He’s going to be okay._ She repeats it to herself like a mantra until she can breathe again.

They’re both crying, and she’s holding his hand so tightly it’s probably hurting him but she can’t make herself let go. She finds a smile, somewhere, and says, “I guess that explains why the sex was never great.”

He chuckles wetly and then buries his tear-streaked face against her chest.

Fuck, she loves this boy.

///

A month later, he asks, “Did you like dating me?”

“Why, you wanna give it another go?” she asks, a joke that slips out before she can think better of it.

It’s the last Friday night before they have to go back to school. They’re lounging together on her parents’ couch, stomachs full of cheap beer and pizza. His head is resting in her lap and she’s playing with his hair.

It’s all very soft and languid and comfortable; this is probably what dating should have felt like.

He scoffs at her proposition just like she expected him too. She’s pretty sure if his eyes weren’t closed he would have rolled them dramatically.

The conversation ends there -- until he shifts and haltingly asks, “Have you ever thought that you might be gay?”

“No.” The answer comes immediately, wrapped up in a laugh she can’t quite suppress.

His shoulders move in a way that might be a shrug if he weren’t lying down. “You never talk about boys.”

“You can talk about boys enough for the both of us,” she teases, then takes another sip of beer and considers. “I never talk about girls,” she adds.

“So you’re not gay,” he surmises, “but you’re not really straight, either.”

Joan makes a noise of assent. “I guess. What does that make me?”

“Special,” he says, and there’s a soft smile on his face she can’t help but mirror.

 


End file.
